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The Sauce (I heaping tablespoonful)
I heaping tablespoonful of gelatine 1 pint of cream Yolks of three eggs 1 teaspoonful of vanilla 1/4 cup of pulverized sugar Cover the gelatine with a little cold water, and soak a half hour. Put the cream on to boil in a farina boiler. Beat the eggs and sugar together until light, add them to the boiling cream, stir until it thickens (about one minute), add the gelatine, stir until dissolved; take from the fire, add the vanilla, and (if you use it) two tablespoonfuls of brandy and four of sherry. Stand it away in a cold place until wanted. it.
If you have not a round mould, use the freezer to mould ICED CAKE WITH A COMPOTE OF STRAWBERRIES
A vanilla custard sauce stiffened with a little gelatine, meant to be poured cold over cake and fruit. The page is a fragment: the closing lines belong to the recipe that follows it, Iced Cake with a Compote of Strawberries, which is what this sauce dresses.
- The hinge: do not let the custard boilAdding beaten yolks to boiling cream will curdle them unless the pan comes off the direct heat as they go in and the mixture is stirred constantly. The "about one minute" is realistic only in a double boiler, where the custard thickens at around 175-180F and stops short of scrambling.
- Farina boilerA double boiler. Set a bowl or upper pan over barely simmering water; the cream should steam and shiver rather than roll.
- Heaping tablespoonful of gelatineSomething like a third to a half ounce of granulated gelatine, so roughly one and a half to two of the modern quarter-ounce envelopes; a heaping spoon is an imprecise measure. This is a sauce, not a jelly: the gelatine is there only to give body once cold.
- SoakingHalf an hour in cold water suits the coarser gelatine of the period; five to ten minutes is enough for modern powder.
- Pulverized sugarFinely ground sugar, closest to today's superfine or caster. Modern confectioners' sugar contains cornstarch and will dull the flavour slightly; ordinary granulated dissolves well enough in the hot cream.
- The spiritsTwo tablespoons brandy and four of sherry is a substantial addition to a pint of cream, and it goes in off the heat, so little of the alcohol cooks away. Add it a spoonful at a time and taste.
- Yield and keepingAbout two and a half cups, enough for eight to ten servings alongside cake and fruit. "A cold place" means the refrigerator; use within two days, and whisk it smooth before serving, as the gelatine will have set it to a loose cream.
This is generally traced to Sarah Tyson Rorer's Hot Weather Dishes, one of the small summer-cookery pamphlets she is often said to have produced out of the Philadelphia Cooking School in the late nineteenth century, when the problem of feeding a household through August without lighting a range all day was a genuine domestic concern. The sauce itself is a stirred custard in the French manner with here with gelatine so that it holds its shape a little against melting ice cream and warm dining rooms and it belongs to a family of gelatine-set creams that spread rapidly through American cookbooks once commercially packaged granulated gelatine became widely available. Before that, cooks extracted their own from calves' feet or isinglass, a day's work. The pairing with iced cake and a compote of strawberries is characteristic of Rorer: cold, showy, and assembled rather than baked.